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"Strength To Love"

(Title from one of MLK's historic speeches)

Ubuntu

Horace Campbell on Mugabe and Ubuntu

When Laurent Kabila was assassinated on January 16, 2001, his son Joseph Kabila unexpectedly replaced him.
To this day, the killers have never been brought before a court of law.
Even when they succeeded in gunning down Laurent-Desire Kabila in January 2001, the war continued until 2003.
What became clear was that Kagame(Rwanda) and Museveni(Uganda) were not able this time to march against Kinshasa(Congo), due to the intervention of Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe.

2011 IMF/WB War Against African Development Bank a.k.a. Kadhafi

Real Causes of Famine by Michel Chossudovsky

The IMF-World Bank program has led the Somali economy into a vicious circle: the decimation of the herds pushed the nomadic pastoralists into starvation which in turn backlashes on grain producers who sold or bartered their grain for cattle..."Food aid", however, was no longer earmarked for the drought-stricken countries of the Sahelian belt; it was also channeled into countries which were, until recently, more or less self-sufficient in food. Zimbabwe (once considered the bread basket of Southern Africa) was severely affected by the famine and drought which swept Southern Africa in 1992. The country experienced a drop of 90 percent in its maize crop, located largely in less productive lands." Yet, ironically, at the height of the drought, tobacco for export (supported by modem irrigation, credit, research, etc.) registered a bumper harvest. While "the famine forces the population to eat termites", much of the export earnings from Zimbabwe's tobacco harvest were used to service the external debt.

Under the structural adjustment program, farmers have increasingly abandoned traditional food crops; in Malawi, which was once a net food exporter, maize production declined by 40 percent in 1992 while tobacco output doubled between 1986 and 1993.

The Debt Crisis and the War Cycle
By: Clif Droke | Thu, Jul 21, 2011

Many books have been written in recent years on the problems facing us due to our nation's enormous debt. Indeed, many more could be written before the full scope of the debt problem and its consequences have been exhausted. One of the best books I've read which describes the debt problem in its simplest and most fundamental terms was written by one Richard Hoskins, entitled War Cycles/Peace Cycles.

Q: So you're saying that U.S. involvement in the Arab world has more to do with interest banking than with oil, per se?

Hoskins: Absolutely...The Arabs have started no interest banking in most of these states. And no interest banking is a real killer to usury banks [i.e. banks that charge interest on loans]. The Bible says you're not supposed to have any interest [on loans] but we don't pay any attention to the Bible anymore. But so does the Islamic holy book, the Quran. In the Arab world they've been on a religious kick since about 1900 and it's getting deeper and deeper. And one of the things they believe is that you shouldn't charge interest. So they opened a bunch of no interest banks. And those no interest banks took over all the business that had been handled by the interest banks, or by the usury banks, out of the West and all the local branches in these Arab countries. Well the usury banks weren't going to stand for that, so one by one each of these countries with a non-usury banking system were being shut down. The Western banks let them open back up with the provision that it had to have a usury system.

It was so obvious back when I wrote the book that I predicted that the Arab countries would be one of the major places where the U.S. would be going to war.

Q: Have you ever seen a country with a usury debt system survive the test of time? What does history tell us happens to a country that embraces such a system?

Hoskins: Let's take a country that we all know about, Rome. It got started and we know it became great and then the bankers came in. And these were the same bankers that had come into Egypt and had taken over Egypt earlier in history. They took over Rome and one of the first things they did was run the farmers out of business. Because a farmer who produces his own food and through his cottage industry raises everything he needs doesn't need anything else or anybody. He's self-sufficient. So the first thing the bankers did was to go after the self-sufficient farms. The countryside was soon deserted but the city of Rome was almost a million people.

Then the taxes started. There's nothing too good for the political leaders. You could hire a Roman army and with that army go in and whip another province or country and rule that country for a year or two and then you had to turn it over to the Roman government. But during that year or two everything that you got out of that country was yours. If you were a banker and could afford to hire a Roman army, in many cases it was really worth it.

Q: So how did it all end up?

Hoskins: It ended up with only five banking families owning all of Rome. Where were the Romans? They had moved out because the taxes they had to pay were unbearable. Each child that was born was taxed and since the girl babies produced less than the boy babies, they left the girl babies out in the open to die of exposure. At the time of Jesus there were more Greeks and Greek slaves being buried in Roman cemeteries than there were Romans. There were almost no Romans left in Italy. They had gone to North Africa, Spain and France and all over the place. For armies the Romans had to hire Germans, Syrians and soldiers from all over.

Then the time came for them to rebuild the walls of Rome. Since it was prohibitively expensive to have children, people in Rome had generally stopped having them. And the walls of Rome were rebuilt only an eighth of the length of the original walls. That's how much the cities had declined in population. All the food that came to Rome came from Egypt and Egypt was a monopoly belonging to the banking families. The food came on lots of ships but they found they could ship the food much cheaper in these huge container ships. Instead of seeing hundreds of sailing ships all over the Mediterranean you'd only see maybe one big container ship a week. When the Vikings finally found their way into the Mediterranean they went from one end to the other and cleaned it out and those big ships were gone, and Rome starved. And when Rome starved they couldn't collect anymore taxes, which meant they couldn't pay the soldiers, which meant the soldiers went home and all of a sudden the borders of Rome collapsed and the invaders came in. And what did they find when they came? They found cities that were virtually vacant, much like Detroit.

Neo-Colonial Cash-Crop Mono-Cropping Under Guise of Neo-Con Disaster Relief, from an article in Black Commentator by John Funicello

60 million hectares (the area of France is about 67 million hectares) has been bought or leased by foreign companies in Africa just in the past three years.

The largest land deal in South Sudan, where as much as 9 percent of the land is said by Norwegian analysts to have been bought in the last few years, was negotiated between a Texas-based firm, Nile Trading and Development and a local co-operative run by absent chiefs. The 49-year lease of 400,000 hectares of central Equatoria for around $25,000 (£15,000) allows the company to exploit all natural resources including oil and timber. The company, headed by former U.S. Ambassador Howard Eugene Douglas, says it intends to apply for UN-backed carbon credits that could provide it with millions of pounds a year in revenues. In Mozambique, where up to 7,000,000 hectares of land is potentially available for investors, western hedge funds are said in the report to be working with South African businesses to buy vast tracts of forest and farmland for investors in Europe and the U.S. The contracts show the government will waive taxes for up to 25 years, but few jobs will be created.(Somalilandpress.com)

Foreign governments have been criticized by advocacy groups for investing in land in South American and African countries, which purportedly would be used to feed their own people, rather than feeding those who live on the purchased or leased land.

Countries said to have leased hundreds of thousands or millions of acres of land on both continents include Saudi Arabia, China, and Belgium. Although it is not clear what they intend to do with the food they raise on the land these countries have taken over, it may be that they will bring the food back home for their own people’s consumption or perhaps they will simply put it up for sale on the world market.

Recently, however, it was reported that American educational institutions have been investing in land. Harvard University and Vanderbilt University, both well endowed, are singled out in reports by the British newspaper, The Guardian, and by the Oakland Institute, an advocacy group based in San Francisco.

They say that the universities are investing through British hedge funds, particularly through the London-based Emergent Asset Management Ltd., an investment firm. Emergent’s proprietary “Geo-Political Model”, the firm asserts, “is deployed by our managers to identify thematic trends in the global political economy.”

Emergent has six sub-themes in its model, including: the evolution of a multi-polar world; scarcity of commodities; polarization of culture and religion, for example, East to West, Christianity to Islam; weapons technology and proliferation; disease and, finally, global warming and the implications of climate change.

In Somalia, it would seem that some of the firm’s sub-themes come together to make for a perfect investment opportunity. Those would be, at the least, scarcity of commodities, polarization of culture and religion, and climate change. For Emergent investors, unrest and natural disasters are opportunities for profit.

"Yet, ironically, at the height of the drought, tobacco for export (supported by modem irrigation, credit, research, etc.) registered a bumper harvest"

From Challenging Western Distortions about Zimbabwe's Land Reform
by Gregory Elich, published on globalreserch.ca

"Prior to the fast track land reform process, large commercial farms
received strong credit line support from both state and private financial
institutions, while nearly all smallholders lacked such support. After
fast track land reform, most of the private financial companies withdrew
altogether from offering credit to farmers. Only two percent of resettled
farmers "benefitted from private sector crop input schemes and none
were beneficiaries for livestock programs." (14) Financial support for
the burgeoning number of farmers fell to the state, which was ill
equipped to meet the need, with its financial resources stretched to
the breaking point by economic sanctions. As a result, only a small
percentage of resettled farmers were able to benefit from adequate
credit support, compelling most of them to rely on their own savings
to manage. (15)

International NGOs for the most part refused to provide any
services to resettled farmers, and focused their efforts
elsewhere. Relying for their funding on Western governments
hostile to the land reform process, NGOs were loath to support
the beneficiaries of a process they preferred to see fail. (16) Less
than three percent of resettled farmers in the AIAS study sample
received extension support from NGOs. "Input assistance from
NGOs was even lower with 1.7 percent of the beneficiaries having
received such support." (17) AIAS interviews with NGO officials
revealed that the organizations were opposed to operating in
resettled areas because they regarded land reform as illegitimate.
(18) These humanitarian organizations, it seems, were much
happier with the old system, in which the many suffered hunger and
privation while the wealthy few thrived."

Cross-ref Haiti Food Sovereignty and 1000 ngo's there not helping.
India Seed Bank

"Clinton hinted that the United States might be willing to accept a deal in which the Libyan leader would voluntarily agree to exile in a third country. She raised the possibility at a news conference at which she was asked whether Gaddafi might be permitted to seek refuge with Zimbabwe's leader, Robert Mugabe." Karen DeYoung and Joby Warrick, Washington Post Staff Writers, Tuesday, March 1, 2011; 12:31 AM

"Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War" by Michel Chossudovsky

Libya was the first country to be tagged for a preemptive attack using tactical nuclear weapons.[3] The Clinton administration's plan to nuke Libya had been announced in no uncertain terms in a 1996 Department of Defense press briefing:

"[The] Air Force would use the B61-11 [nuclear weapon] against Libya's alleged underground chemical weapons plant at Tarhunah if the President decided that the plant had to be destroyed. 'We could not take [Tarhunah] out of commission using strictly conventional weapons,' Smith told the Associated Press. The B61-11 'would be the nuclear weapon of choice,' he [Assistant Secretary of Defense Harold P. Smith] told Jane Defence Weekly.[4]

Clinton's Defense Secretary William Perry had confirmed in a statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that "the U.S. retained the option of using nuclear weapons against countries [e.g. Libya] armed with chemical and biological weapons."[5] The Department of Defense's objective was to fast track the "testing" of the B61-11 nuclear bomb on an actual country and that country was Libya: "Even before the B61 came on line, Libya was identified as a potential target".[6]

While the 1996 plan to bomb Libya using tactical nuclear weapons was subsequently shelved, Libya was not removed from the "black list": "The Qadhafi regime" remains to this date a target country for a pre-emptive ("defensive") nuclear attack. As revealed by William Arkin in early 2002, "The Bush administration, in a secret policy review... [had] ordered the Pentagon to draft contingency plans for the use of nuclear weapons against at least seven countries, naming not only Russia and the "axis of evil" Iraq, Iran, and North Korea but also China, Libya and Syria.[7]

Operation Odyssey Dawn. Nuclear Weapons against Libya? How Real is the Threat?

Has the project to nuke Libya been definitively shelved or is Libya still being contemplated as a potential target for a nuclear attack? (This preface serves as an update on the potential dangers of a nuclear war against a defenseless non-nuclear State). The air campaign directed against Libya commenced on March 19, 2011. America deployed its Bat-shaped B-2 Spirit Stealth bombers operating out of the Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. Described as "deadly and effective", the B-2 was used as an instrument of "humanitarian warfare".

Barely two weeks after the commencement of the war, the Pentagon announced the testing of the B61-11 nuclear bomb using the same B-2 Stealth bombers which had been deployed to Libya at the very outset of Operation Odyssey Dawn. The B-2 Spirit Stealth bomber is the US Air Force's chosen "carrier" for the delivery of the B61-11 nuclear bomb. These timely tests pertained to the installed equipment, functionality and weapon's components of the B61-11 nuclear bomb. The tests were conducted by the B-2 bombers operating out of the same Air Force base, from which the B-2 bombing raid on Libya were conducted.[8]

Is the timing of these tests in any way related to the chronology of the Libya bombing campaign?

The U.S. Air Force Global Strike Command was in charge of both the JTA tests of the B61-11 as well as the deployment of three B-2 Spirit Stealth bombers to Libya on March 19 under operation Odyssey Dawn. Both the deployment of the B-2s to the Libya war theater as well as the tests of the equipment of the B61-11 (using the B-2 bomber for delivery) were coordinated out of Whiteman Air Force base.

(If that means Obama can be blamed for a flyover of Libya by a B2 carrying a live nuke two weeks after US/NATO went to war with Libya, that dry run by a B2 with a nuke on board would seem to resemble Kennedy threatening to nuke the Russians, and that has been cited as a closer among arguments for assassination considered by the actual JFK assassination cabal. NATO dragging the war out looks like Waco and Bay of Pigs -Bob)

IMF/WB is having US/NATO bomb Libya's irrigation project, the largest irrigation project in history. Search news for nato bombing gmmr.

South African food sovereignty campaigners move to occupy land
Ronald Wesso
2011-08-18, Issue 545, Pambuzuka News

The national land reform process is a complete failure that managed to transfer less than five per cent of agricultural land from white to black ownership.

Patrick Steenkamp of the Loeriesfontein Emerging Farmers Association explains that they have been doing the same thing that their Kareeberg comrades are planning. ‘We became fed up with the municipality. They collected rent but they did nothing for us. There were no services. So we decided to develop the land ourselves. We put up our own fencing and our own windmills. We refused to pay rent. This has been going on for two years now. The land reform has failed us. The municipality has failed us. We will not fail ourselves. We are occupying this land.

A Famine of Quality, by SIR ALBERT HOWARD, C.I.E., Editor of Soil and Health, From Organic Gardening, Vol. II, No. 5, November, 1947

The importance of the proteins made by the green leaf needs no argument. What happens if this item in our food is neglected? The answer is disease, including the diseases of the teeth. Disease in one form or another follows from any neglect in providing the green leaf with the proper materials for synthesising stable proteins. Should this happen the huge protein molecules become weak and unstable: pieces may easily be broken off: these we call viruses. Viruses are therefore not the cause of disease but rather the indications of a famine of quality.

Two main causes are responsible for the production of unstable proteins: (1) growing crops on worn-out soil and (2) introducing into the nitrogen cycle a substitute for humus in the shape of chemical fertilisers. Both, these practices create a weak link in the protein chain between the soil and the plant which is carried forward to the animal, to mankind and then back again to the soil. Obviously attempts to put this right at the human end of the protein chain, by the help of a national health service, are bound to fail. The new national health scheme therefore merely tinkers with trouble after it has happened and does nothing to get to the root of the mischief--the soil.

How did this famine of quality originate? In two ways: (1) by improper methods of agriculture and (2) by the murder of our daily bread. These two factors must now be considered one by one.

Ever since the year 1879, when a combination of the worst season on record and the importation of cheap wheat from the New World put an end to the system of mixed farming, which Coke of Norfolk did so much to establish, insufficient attention has been paid to the earth's, green carpet and to the work of the green leaf. We have tried to make our proteins on the cheap side, as it were. A famine of quality has gradually set in which has been accelerated by the vast supplies of bastard nitrogen in the shape of sulphate of ammonia placed on the market by the makers of the explosives needed in the world war of 1914-18.

The importation of cheap wheat from the virgin soils of the New World did more than help to put an end to the golden age of British farming. This soon led to the murder of our daily bread by providing the roller mills at the ports with the very thing they wanted to incorporate some six per cent. of water in the flour and to sell the offals (which include the priceless germ, the bran and most of the minerals) separately at good prices. By removing the bran a white flour was obtained: the separation of the germ yielded a flour which would carry six per cent. of added water without going mouldy: To obtain a still whiter flour bleaching with chemicals was introduced--first nitrous oxide and then nitrogen trichloride (used in the so-called "Agene process"). Yeast foods in the shape of phosphates, and latterly chalk have also been added. The worst results of this sophistication have been: (1) interference with the powers of elimination leading to widespread constipation and the consequent autointoxication, (2) loss of the power of reproduction and of resistance to invading bacteria and (3) damage to the proteins by the nitrogen trichloride. The investigations by Dr. Weston Price indicate that one of the great causes of dental troubles is murdered bread. He has shown beyond any shadow of doubt in his Nutrition and Physical Degeneration that when primitive races with perfect teeth take to white man's food including plenty of white flour dental caries set m in a very few months. This is arrested when the patients return to their original way of life.

More Famine of Quality, how urea ruins the soil.